Coming Back to Yourself: Healing After Narcissistic and Emotional Abuse
Emotional abuse is often subtle. It doesn’t always leave visible bruises, but it leaves deep imprints, on your nervous system, your sense of safety, and your ability to trust yourself.
If you’ve experienced narcissistic or emotional abuse, you may know the disorienting cycle of charm followed by criticism, connection followed by control. Over time, it can chip away at your inner clarity until you’re left questioning your own reality.
This kind of trauma doesn’t just end when the relationship ends.
But healing is possible, and it begins with coming back to yourself.
What Emotional Abuse Can Feel Like
Emotional abuse isn’t always easy to name, especially when it’s wrapped in affection, apology, or promises to change.
You might have experienced:
Gaslighting: being told your feelings or memories are wrong
Control masked as concern: being isolated or manipulated “for your own good”
Shifting blame: walking on eggshells to avoid conflict
Subtle shaming or constant criticism
Being made to feel like everything is your fault
Even after leaving the relationship, these patterns can live on in the form of self-doubt, anxiety, hypervigilance, or numbness.
Healing means recognizing that what happened wasn’t your fault, and gently reconnecting with the parts of you that had to go quiet to survive.
You Are Not Broken, You Adapted
The ways you learned to cope, shutting down, over-explaining, people-pleasing, and second-guessing, weren’t signs of weakness. They were strategies.
Your body and mind did what they had to do to stay safe.
Part of healing is honoring those survival strategies…
And gently beginning to ask: What would it feel like to live beyond them?
Rebuilding Trust in Yourself
After emotional abuse, trusting yourself again can feel like learning a new language. But that trust was never truly lost; it was buried beneath fear and confusion.
You can begin to rebuild it by:
Noticing your inner voice, even when it’s unsure
Validating your feelings instead of pushing them away
Honoring your boundaries, even when it’s uncomfortable
Letting yourself slow down before saying yes
Small moments of self-honoring add up.
Over time, they become a path back to your own truth.
The Nervous System’s Role in Healing
Emotional abuse often puts the nervous system in a long-term state of fight, flight, or freeze. That’s why healing can’t happen just by thinking differently; it has to include the body.
Somatic healing invites the body back into safety, gently and slowly.
This might look like:
Placing your hand on your heart when you feel overwhelmed
Noticing what sensations arise when you speak a boundary
Practicing grounding exercises when triggered
Letting your body move, shake, or rest as needed
You don’t have to fix everything at once.
Safety builds in layers, and your body will show you the way.
A Soft Place to Land
Healing after narcissistic or emotional abuse takes time. Some days it may feel like progress. Other days, like grief. But every small moment of clarity, boundary, or self-kindness is part of the process.
You are allowed to:
Take up space
Say no
Change your mind
Ask for what you need
Rest, even when the world expects more
You are not too much.
You are not too sensitive.
You are not to blame.
You are learning to live in truth again, and that is incredibly brave.
If you’re healing from emotional abuse and want a space to feel safe, seen, and supported, I’m here. Reach out here for a free consultation; you don’t have to walk this path alone.